Dive For Your Memory: Preparing for my Research Reveals on my project on Queensland Musicians

This blog was written by 2024 John Oxley Library Fellow, Dr John WIllsteed as part of his fellowship project, Dive For Your Memory – Queensland music stories.

As I have been filming these chats, I have noticed something, well, not really surprising, but certainly unintended. I really wanted to make sure that we weren’t just regurgitating information that was already out there in the music press or bios or reviews or press releases. And that seems to be how it has panned out.

The chats start at birth and wind their way up through childhood, slowly and carefully for most, with lots of pausing and rewinding to capture as much colour and texture as we can. I want to know about parents and how they met; where they came from and what they did with their lives. I want to know about neighbours and teachers and schoolfriends, to test those stretched connections, and uncover their value or impact after many decades.

And then I want to know about music. Was it in the DNA? Or did it seep in from outside – from teachers or older siblings? From the transistor radio or vinyl or Countdown? What was it that grabbed the ear and stirred the heart (or the loins!)? The responses have been as different as these musicians are. 

Interviewing musicians isn’t that hard, they are usually keen to talk. I was lucky to grab a few people over summer who were in town, fleetingly. Here are a couple of them:

Charlie Owen: Although Charlie was born in the UK, he spoke with passion about the years he spent in Brisbane in his early 20s. He came from a family of painters, and as his sisters developed their skills, Charlie embraced the “art of music” in a painterly way. He followed his passion into jazz, and then abstract jazz moving further away from the confines of lyrical, popular music structures. Ironic, then, that over time Charlie has played on record and stage with such a range of Australian rock icons: The Beasts of Bourbon, The Divinyls, The New Christs, Louis Tillett, Kim Salmon and The Cruel Sea.

Graeme Connors: Growing up in Mackay and coming from an Irish Catholic family, Graeme was well-loved as a child. Singing Danny Boy at his dad’s 40th invoked such a strong audience reaction that he became hooked on performing. After moving to Brisbane and signing to Festival, he was lucky enough to support Kris Kristofferson on a national tour in the mid 1974, only to have Kristofferson to be so taken with him that he would get him up on stage each night and then produced a clutch of tracks on Connors’ debut album.  Graeme was 18, and this experience changed his life.

John Kennedy: John was born in Liverpool in the late 50s, and, like a number of Brisbane musicians of his generation, came to settle in Acacia Ridge with his family in the wave of “ten-pound-poms” in the 60s. These things remain strong memories for John and many of the interviewees: the heat; the bush at the end of the street; the creek down the road; the long summers; pushbikes and quiet dusk; the call to dinner. Through the many vehicles for his songwriting (JFK and The Cuban Crisis/John Kennedy’s Love Gone Wrong/John Kennedy’s ‘68 Comeback Special etc) he has gathered a devoted audience over decades. John lived in Germany during the 1990s, and, since retiring from his day job as an architect, has returned there with a view to moving to Spain. Sounds pretty nice!

These stories from Queenslanders as diverse as these three, yet united in their love of music, will be a resource for researchers into the future. Although this is really quite a simple social history project, it digs deep into why people devote their lives to a particular passion, whilst it sheds light on what it’s like to pursue this passion in a place which was, certainly through the 70s and 80s, quite antagonistic towards youth and youth culture. 

More in my next blog...

Dr John Willsteed
2024 John Oxley Library Fellow

Read other blogs by Dr John Willsteed.

Watch Dr John Willsteed’s Research Reveals talk below, or explore more talks on the Research Reveals webpage.

The full collection of digital stories from Dr John Willsteed’s Dive For Your Memory project is currently being processed by State Library’s Collection Building and Metadata teams and will be available in our catalogue soon.